Tag: FrozenReeds

The 16th and final disc of “A Little Milky Way of Sound”. After the abrasive menace of Icursim, Arasa is an interesting contrast. Much of it is very quiet, perhaps the quietest piece of the entire 14 hour composition.

13 hours in, and I can’t say I feel any more confident in detecting an organizing principle or finding motifs in, “A Little Milky Way of Sound,” than I was on day one.

There is definitely a sonic palette that Kayn uses and reuses with varying tweaks applied. The shimmering fields of static sound. The streaming, whooshing, noises like pressurized air or water.

It is interesting how the lack of definable or typical “musical sounds” affects your listening. The slightest nearly recognizable sample, whether it is a creaking door or a processed voice, stands out, calling attention to itself.

Of course, it’s always possible, that those sounds are just my mind attempting to make sense of the boiling sonic chaos.

In any case, Icursim is more menacing, than threatening, with louder than usual percussive events at intervals among the other sounds.

Ritaces starts in the neighborhood of the previous haunted Ecerit pieces, then starts to sound like a summing up. Pieces of previous strategies, that would have been allotted significant time, flash by. Familiar sounding events crop up and fade into others. Foghorns bellow, water streams against pitch charged plates, and many doors creak open in quick succession.

A Little Milky Way of Sound Day 13, Ecerit I, II, and III, by Roland Kayn.

Maybe it is my mood, but the three Ecerit pieces seem to have more dramatic tension than many of the others in A Little Milky Way of Sound. Definitely, horror movie soundtrack worthy material. Something about swelling swoops and tone slides. Enjoyable, if menacing.

Prahoxx starts quietly humming, then moves to some of the most relatively raucous and ominous sounding events in this unusual Milky Way.

Jim O’Rourke, the endlessly hyphenated musician and engineer, took on the task of engineering and restoring these works from the DAT tapes they were recorded to. He was a long time fan of Kayn’s, describing some of his more adventurous attempts at electronic composition as “lame attempts at Kayn inspired music.” Mr O’Rourke, describing aspects of the recording, “But this does seem like it was Kayn’s ‘summing up’ of his work. At this point since I am working on it on a very microscopic level instead of a macro level, I am learning a lot about his work just by looking at the waveforms. I always knew phase relationship was a big part of how his pieces worked, but actually looking at it has been kind of eye opening.”

Just a reminder, our tyrant in a teapot would like nothing more than to have most of the Federal Government shut down, permanently.

As long as it doesn’t affect segments of the military, Dept of Homeland Security, ICE, or incoming tax revenue, he, and his brain trust, (Mulvaney, Bannon, Ryan, etc.) would prefer that the government gets a lot smaller. Preferably pretty much nonexistent.

A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound, Disk Eight: Radox, by Roland Kayn.

Marking the half-way point through the Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound.

Kayn called his music as “Cybernetic Music”. “Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems—their structures, constraints, and possibilities. Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics in 1948 as ‘the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.’” Kayne’s music is almost post-human. One could imagine these music systems, put in motion, continuing on after their creator, or creators is long gone.

Ractil and Zearid have a bit more harmonic content than many of the pieces so far. Sounding a bit like a steam powered calliope, on the deck of a starliner, as the ship tilts into the event horizon of a black hole.